Continually New
I had a dream last night about needing to repair the table that my Pawpaw built.
I had this dream last night about needing to repair the table that my Pawpaw built.
It's 7-feet long, made out of reclaimed barn wood, and has survived nearly 40 years of continual childhood assault. It has served as fort, stage, wall, shop bench, paint canvas, and more. It has survived more moves than I can count, has lived in at least six different states, and occupied both sides of a continent.
And I realized that even things like that, which seem super sturdy and strong, wear down over a period of time that starts to seem very short as you get older. Multi-generational things age more quickly than you think. Even something that lasts three generations is only two generations from its end, and that quickly becomes one. Things you put your hand to as a child, quickly become things your child puts their hand to, and that moves faster than you can think. You think you'll measure your baby's foot size this afternoon, and you forget it that one day, and it's suddenly years later.
Buddhists have these meditations on rocks wearing down. Someone touching a rock every day, and in a million years, the rock has worn to nothing. It occurs to me this is just a coy way of talking about the actual things in your life. At my age, I can glimpse four generations back, and can start to see several generations ahead, and everything all of them passed down, and felt like permanence, has been eroded until it is only the thinnest of threads.
And so this is what occurs to me. And it feels like my theme for the year:
The way you keep the world young is that you make it continually new.